Bridge of Sighs

Twenty-one years ago tomorrow, Air Florida flight 90 clipped the 14th Street Bridge and plunged into the icy waters of Washinton's Potomac River. Just five people escaped. Here, Emily Yoffe tracks down the survivors and hears the high price they too have paid.

She comes to lunch holding the frayed manila envelope she usually keeps hidden in the basement. That's where she stores what's left of the life she didn't get to live. She is 47, small and pretty, with deep-set green eyes and honey-coloured hair. She doesn't want her name used because she hasn't yet told her children that when she was a young woman, before she met their father, she was in love with another man. His name was Robert Silberglied, and he was a 35-year-old scientist, an expert in butterflies, a protégé of EO Wilson, the famous biologist. On the morning of 13 January 1982, Silberglied asked her to marry him, and she said yes.

They were oblivious to the world that day, so when it was time for him to go to the airport in the afternoon, they were surprised by how much snow had fallen. She begged him to cancel his reservation and stay with her, but he was determined to go. He was headed from Washington to Panama for research, but first he was going to stop in Florida to tell his parents the news of his engagement. He laughed when he imagined their stunned reaction.

They got in her car and, on the way, in the snow, she skidded and hit the curb. 'If I had hit a car it would have been an accident and we wouldn't have gotten to the airport,' she says. But there was no accident and he made his flight. Then his plane took off and it crashed into a bridge and sank into the frozen Potomac River. When they finally found his body, in his pocket were a pair of laminated butterfly wings and a photograph.

His fiancée opened the envelope and pulled out the wings, their colours still vivid, and a copy of the photo of herself, young and smiling, that she gave him that morning.

Twenty-one years ago, Air Florida Flight 90, on its way from Washington National Airport to Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, crashed seconds after takeoff, its wings frosted with snow and ice. As the Boeing 737 hit the 14th Street Bridge, it sheared the tops off cars stuck in a traffic jam caused by the storm. On the plane, 74 people died, including three babies; and four people were killed in their cars. There were only five survivors. Television crews filmed them as they waited almost half an hour in the ice-filled water to be rescued, hanging on to debris from the plane. A young office assistant for a government agency, Lenny Skutnik, briefly became famous when he dived into the river and, on national television, saved a woman who was about to drown.

The Air Florida plane crashed because of a series of foolish mistakes. It was a catastrophe in which many lost their lives and a few survived only to return to lives forever altered.

Now, two decades later, the paths of those who made it out of the water show there is no formula for what to do with the relief, guilt, joy and anger that follows such a catastrophe. The family members of those killed say, too, that there is no blueprint for the grief one faces after such a sudden, public loss. It is a long process, they say, to accept that terrible piece of information - that everything about their loved one is now in the past - and to fit the finality of that fact into the rest of their own lives.

'It was so perfect,' the fiancée says now. Their courtship was brief, intense, magical. They were almost comically made for each other. A colleague of Silberglied's remembers him saying, 'She's shorter than I am, she's Jewish and she loves insects.' She was an entomologist herself, at the Smithsonian in Washington, where they met. Silberglied, who had been a professor at Harvard, was working for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

'Immeasurable,' is how Harvard's EO Wilson describes the loss. Silberglied had a 19th-century naturalist's ability to immerse himself in nature and see things that hadn't been described before, and a 20th-century scientist's ability to use technology to unravel the rules of the natural world.

His fiancée, so their plan went, would come to Panama and live with him in his trailer in the jungle, and she would raise butterflies for his experiments. They agreed the morning of their engagement that they would like to have two children.

'I loved the idea of raising butterflies and having kids in the jungle,' she says. She laughs when she compares their lost plans with her real life: 'I drive a station wagon and live in the suburbs.' They had barely got to know each other when he died, and afterwards she wanted to know him better. She called his parents, Harry and Mildred, and told them that she was the last person to be with him, that she and their son had become close. They invited her to visit and she went, staying in the bedroom that used to be his, looking through his things. At some point she told them how close she and Bob were; that she was supposed to have become their daughter-in-law.

About nine months after Silberglied's death, a friend insisted on fixing her up on a blind date. She didn't want to go, but she also didn't want to become 'like a character in a book who never gets over it'. She mostly talked about what had happened, and her date was a good listener. Slowly, she fell in love. Two years later, they were married. She kept in touch with the Silberglieds - she is listed in Mildred's phone book as 'Bob's friend' - and right after her first child was born (she eventually did have two), they visited. When she put her baby in Harry Silberglied's arms, she remembers, 'He said: "I haven't held a child in so many years. It feels so good."' She thought to herself, 'I could have had your grandchildren.' Because she couldn't, nobody did.

Kelly Duncan Moore lived because she was obeying regulations. She was a flight attendant, the most junior crew member on Flight 90. After hours of delays, when the plane was finally ready to push off, she took her seat, as required, at the back of the plane. One of the two other flight attendants was supposed to sit with her, but the two others were best friends and deep in conversation, and they sat down together near the cockpit. No one from the front of the plane survived.

Moore didn't have any idea the plane was about to crash. When it shuddered after takeoff a passenger turned around with a terrified look on his face, and Moore just shrugged and tightened her seat belt. The next thing she knew she was in the water. Somehow she managed to hold on to pieces of freezing metal.

'In that water,' she says, 'as horrible and out of control as it seemed, I felt somehow that God was watching.' It was an unusual feeling for her - she had grown up in a family that hadn't gone to church even at Christmas or Easter. But by the time she got to the hospital, she says, she knew God was real. 'I was reborn Jan 13,' she says now.

When the plane took off, she was Kelly Duncan, 22, looking like a teenager with her braces and bangs. Today she is a 43-year-old pre-school teacher at a Christian school, married to a tennis pro and the mother of three. Her house is full of the tumult of her children and their friends, who are sprawled on the floor doing homework, running to the phone, playing with the two dogs. She presides over the chaos with an amused grace.

The weekend before the crash, she says, turned out to be the final weekend of her old life. She and several friends decided to drink their way from Miami to the Keys, stopping at every bar along the way. After the plane went down, when she was in the icy water, 'I had a U-turn and I changed,' she says. 'It just really was like God reached out and grabbed on to me.' At first she wasn't sure what to do about her new feelings.

She was afraid her family and friends would think she had become a 'religious nut'. A woman sent to visit her in the hospital, who had also survived a crash, told her that such sudden religious feeling is common and would pass. But it never did, and, in all the years since, she says, 'God has been faithful.'

She has kept mementos of the crash - videotapes, newspaper clippings, articles, photographs - but she rarely looks at them. They are all dumped in a large plastic bin she pulls from a storage room. ('This is not pleasant enough for me to make a scrapbook, but I want to keep it for my kids.') In the bin is a video of her rescue. She pops it into the VCR, and there she is in the water, pieces of ice as big as doors bobbing around her. Then there is a helicopter and a rope and she grabs it and she comes out of the water, barefoot, her stockings shredded, her apron flying in the wind.

She broke her wrist and ankle in the crash and still bears a wide six-inch scar on the back of her left thigh, but her physical injuries were not terrible. What was worse was the guilt. She felt guilty that she was alive. She felt guilty that she wasn't nicer to the passengers. 'It was the last time they were with somebody.' She felt guilty about the middle-aged woman who just before takeoff asked worriedly if it was safe. 'I was annoyed. I said, "If it wasn't safe, I wouldn't be here."' She felt guilty that she didn't tell her colleague to sit where she was supposed to. She felt guilty about the photograph that was published of her in her hospital room, surrounded by balloons and champagne, looking as if she was celebrating when so many others had died. Her faith has allowed her to let go of the guilt. 'We think we control things we don't,' she says. There were four other survivors, a tiny group pulled from the Potomac and given what seemed like a miraculous chance at a full life. They haven't talked to one another in years. 'I used to try to keep in touch, then I realised we're all strangers,' Moore says. 'All you have in common is this day you want to forget.' There was something unexpectedly painful about the experience of being spared when so many died.

Priscilla Tirado, 43, was rescued by Lenny Skutnik. Her young husband, José, and their two-month-old son were killed - the infant's was the last body recovered, 11 days after the crash. Other survivors remember hearing her scream for someone to find her baby as they all bobbed in the water. She lives in Florida in the town where her parents lived - her father, who was her protector and spokesman, died in 1999. On 13 January 1982, she was flying to Florida with her new family so her husband could take a job in the construction industry. In 20 years, she has said only a few sentences to the press about the accident. Five years after the crash she told a reporter: 'It's still hard for me. Sometimes I have my days. I had a good life with José. He was real good for me.' A decade after the crash, her father told The Washington Post, 'After 10 years, we're beginning to wonder if this will ever work itself out.' She declined to be interviewed for this story.

Joseph Stiley, 63, was an executive with GTE. When the plane went down he was in the middle of a divorce, and he went back to his parents' home to recover. His right leg was broken in the crash, his left shattered, and he remembers his father, an ex-Green Beret, gently cleaning the pins the surgeons inserted in his leg while his mother held his head in her lap. 'I really got back in touch with my feelings and my family,' he says. 'That's the joy side.'

The other side is that the trauma to his neck and spine left him with bone spurs that caused chronic pain and forced him to give up an executive career of constant travel. He missed that international life, the exposure to other cultures. He now lives in Washington State and describes himself as 'a semi-recluse with a lot of infirmities'.

Last spring, in a strange coincidence, two of the five survivors died of natural causes. The new life they'd been granted when they were pulled from the Potomac lasted exactly 20 years. Bert Hamilton, 61, died unexpectedly in his sleep of a heart attack on 5 April, 2002. At the time of the crash he was travelling with a group of seven colleagues from Fairchild Space and Electronics. Hamilton was the only one to survive. He was the man whose face Moore saw in the seconds before the plane went down.

Hamilton's right wrist and fingers were put back together like a jigsaw puzzle. But the trauma of the crash caused constant pain in his neck for the rest of his life. Surviving the crash also sent him into an uncharacteristic depression. His wife, Barbara, recalls the agony of the memorial service for her husband's dead colleagues, and how the two of them grieved for the widows and children left behind.

He went back to work after the crash; he felt he owed it to his dead colleagues. But it didn't feel like what he wanted to do with this new chance at life. He put in another 18 months, then one day came home from the office and said he was ready to 'hang it up'. He already had a pension from the Air Force, so he and Barbara moved to Florida - warm weather eased his pain. He decided he wanted to tell people what he'd learnt from the crash, and he became a motivational speaker, delivering inspirational talks about obstacles and fate and survival.

Patricia Felch was Joe Stiley's administrative assistant at the time of the crash and the last person to be rescued. She died at 48 of pancreatic cancer on 21 April 2002 - just two-and-a-half weeks after Bert Hamilton.

In the years after the accident, Felch married and divorced, returned to school and moved from Virginia to Florida and back. When she got sick, she moved into her mother's home in Virginia so that her mother could care for her at the end. Shortly before her death, in a delicate, tiny voice, she spoke of the painful chemotherapy and radical surgery she had undergone, and the hopes she still had that the treatment would save her. 'Life did not treat me well this time,' she said, without self-pity.

Over the decades, say family members who lost someone on Flight 90, the anger - at the pilots, at the airline, at fate, at God - dissipates. The physical manifestations of grief - the feeling of a rock caught in the throat, the numbness in the limbs, the sense of drowning, the obsessive thoughts, the insomnia, the holes in one's memory - also pass. The pain of what happened hurts less and less, to be replaced by the realisation of what will never be. 'I go through phases where I wish I had my father to talk to,' says Patrick Zondler, 40, a manager in a department store. 'To get his advice, his perspective on things, on some choices I'm going to have to make at work.' His father, William, a communications executive, died at the age of 44 while travelling on business. Patrick was 19.

Anthony Ivener, now a 37-year-old partner in an accounting firm, was 16 when his father, Arnold, 46, a civilian engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, was killed. 'The hardest thing is not having my father know my family,' he says. 'Not having my father know what I've done with my life.' He and his wife have a seven-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son. On the 20th anniversary of the crash, Ivener and his daughter went to visit the grave of the grandfather she never knew, then went out to dinner to talk about him. It was a good day, Ivener says. At one point his daughter, Allison, said, 'You know, Daddy, he's been dead longer than you knew him alive.' Ivener makes a sound of air rushing past, of time rushing by. He looked at his daughter and thought: 'You're seven years old. How lovely it would have been for you to know my father.'

Joy Friedberg, 50, became consumed with the death of her brother, Benson Levinson, who was 26 when he died. In the beginning, no event could pass - his birthday, Fourth of July, Passover - without the stab of knowledge that it was the first one without him. That lasted a year. Then she found herself constantly returning to the awful means of his death and thoughts of how much he knew, how long he suffered. After three years, that faded. But for years after the crash, thoughts of him still smoldered in her head like an underground fire. 'There's a tenacity the dead have on the living that no living person has on you,' she says. 'The dead are truly gone. The only way you have to keep them is to think about them over and over again.'

She and her brother looked strikingly alike, with strong bone structure and huge, dark eyes. They even had two moles in the same place on their faces. Friedberg decided to have hers removed, and that helped. She stopped seeing his face superimposed on hers when she looked in the mirror.

Benson Levinson's mother, Jean, never recovered. She died in April of Alzheimer's disease; the family say they believe the trauma of Benson's death triggered her decline. She seemed to fold up within herself, they say, after he died.

Lenny Skutnik reaches under the dresser in his bedroom and pulls out the Rockport shoebox in which he keeps the videotapes of his daring act and its aftermath. He puts on the tape of the State of the Union address Ronald Reagan delivered shortly after the crash, and we are transported to another time. Reagan, exhorting a dispirited country, says American heroes are not just figures of the past. He gets specific. 'Just two weeks ago, in the midst of a terrible tragedy on the Potomac, we saw again the spirit of American heroism at its finest,' he says. 'We saw the heroism of one of our young government employees, Lenny Skutnik, who, when he saw a woman lose her grip on the helicopter line, dived into the water and dragged her to safety.' At that point Skutnik, looking abashed in the visitors' gallery, stands. ('A hand from behind pushed me up,' he says.) He gets a standing ovation from the crowd, and Reagan salutes him. Since then it has become unthinkable for a president to deliver a State of the Union address without honouring a hero in the gallery.

The commotion churned up in his life by his few astounding seconds in the water is over. Unlike the families of the victims, or the survivors, the life that Skutnik had before the accident was easy to reclaim. He is still with the Congressional Budget Office, printing and distributing documents. He still lives in the same suburban Virginia town house with the same wife that he returned to late the night of the crash - although the infant son they had then now attends George Washington University on a baseball scholarship. Lenny Skutnik is physically little changed - a few grey hairs and a few extra pounds - from the 28-year-old in a blue short-sleeved shirt who made all the papers.

He doesn't like applying the word 'hero' to himself. He says policemen and firefighters, those who choose every day to endanger themselves for others and who paid with their lives by the hundreds on 11 September, are true heroes. He won't take much credit for what he did that day. 'It was human instinct,' he says. 'It happens all the time. This was in the nation's capital. It got into living rooms. That's what made it so big.'

In a dusty glass-fronted case on the piano bench, Skutnik keeps the palm-sized Carnegie Medal for heroism and the Coast Guard's Gold Lifesaving Medal. There is a key to the city of Alexandria, Virginia, and one to Columbia, Mississippi, where he once lived. ('It doesn't open anything,' he says.) The Polish Police Association honoured him, and so did the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. He made television appearances and spoke to schoolchildren.

But there is some bitterness, too, about what came after. He felt pressured and tricked by the press to appear over and over again. He felt his story was becoming a commodity. 'A hero seems something to be bought and sold,' he says. He was offered about $1,500 for the rights to his story for a cheesy television movie called Flight 90: Disaster on the Potomac. He turned it down, but the movie was made and they used his story anyway.

After he lauded Skutnik, Reagan was informed of an almost-unknown hero, Roger Olian. Olian, a sheet-metal foreman at St Elizabeth's, a Washington hospital for the mentally ill, was on his way home across the 14th Street bridge when he heard a man yelling that there was a plane in the water. Olian thought he was crazy, but ran down the bank to take a look. He saw the tail of a full-sized jet; the rest was gone. In the water were the handful of survivors screaming for help. 'I was overwhelmed with the fact there was nothing you could do,' he recalls. 'Nothing to use. No trees for branches. The only option was to stand on the bank and hope something happened - or hop in.' He hopped.

He didn't have much of a plan except to get close to the victims and tell them that help was on the way - even though he didn't believe it. He knew a boat couldn't navigate through the ice, and he wasn't sure a helicopter could make it through the storm. People on the bank made a makeshift rope, using jumper cables and scarves, and threw it to Olian to tie around his waist. There were no cameras as Olian plunged into the water. He made his way through the water and over ice floes for 20 minutes, yelling words of encouragement. Finally a helicopter appeared, and the people on the bank pulled Olian back to shore. After word came of Olian's actions, Reagan wrote to him in mid-February to rectify his oversight. 'I deeply regret the lateness of my message of congratulations to you for the heroic part you played,' the letter read. 'You are truly one of the unsung heroes of our nation.'

But there was another hero, too - the 'mystery hero'. He was the sixth person who survived the crash, a middle-aged man who, according to the United States Park Police helicopter rescuers, refused their lifeline, indicating that it should go to the others. When they finally circled back to retrieve him, he had slipped below the surface. The coroner found that only one victim of the crash died of drowning, not trauma. That was Arland Williams Jr, a 46-year-old bank examiner. A letter from Williams's mother, Virginia, to Reagan, asking that her son be named as the hero, prompted a Coast Guard investigation. More than a year after the crash, Williams was honoured in an Oval Office ceremony.

Joan Silberglied, Robert's older sister, didn't have children. Her father died eight years ago and her mother last year, and now she's the only one left. Her parents and brother are buried together not far from her small garden apartment in Boca Raton, Florida, but when it's her turn, she won't join them. 'I didn't belong,' she says. She believes that she was the disappointment of the family, the rejected one, the black sheep. Her mother's identity, she says, was wrapped up in the accomplishments of her brother. When he died, it became wrapped up in his loss. Her mother would introduce the topic of his death immediately to anyone she met. 'She made a spectacle of herself over it,' Joan says. She smokes a cigarette and considers, then adds, 'I'll admit, she lost a pretty good son.' Joan is 58, slender like her brother. She has a smoke-cured voice and her father's soft, rounded features, his curly salt-and-pepper hair. 'I had his jowls, too, but I had them cut off,' she offers. She works as a receptionist. It's the latest in a lifelong string of short-term jobs: science teacher, welfare caseworker, dental assistant, manicurist. She could never fill the hole left in her family by her brother's death. They all tiptoed around the crater; her relations with her parents became politely hostile. I ask what she thinks her relationship with her brother would have been had he lived. At first she says she has never given it a thought. Then she says, 'My brother probably would have had a compassionate attitude toward me.' She recalls that when her parents went to clean out his Harvard office, a janitor came over to them and said most of the people at Harvard treated him as if he were invisible, but that Robert always talked with him. 'I thought that was pretty nice, that he wasn't a snob,' Joan says, and begins to cry.

When Robert was alive, she was consumed with the recurring thought that when her parents died he would be named their executor, even though she was the older sibling. His death gave her that role, and more. She was left the $500,000 settlement from the crash. She plans to retire on it.

She also inherited all her parents' papers and mementos - boxes of stuff about Robert. She only kept a few things. In her kitchen is a precise pen-and-ink drawing of a tiger swallowtail butterfly Robert made at the age of 12. His passion since boyhood had been butterflies - his PhD thesis was on butterfly communication. She also has the classical and rock music he taped: each cassette, each song, labelled, numbered and timed, with a cross-reference in a loose-leaf notebook. In envelopes are his diplomas from Cornell and Harvard. Tucked inside one is a condolence letter to her parents from EO Wilson and a notice of a memorial fund established in his name at the Smithsonian. There is also a brown accordion file. She has never looked inside. I open it. In the file, with a meticulousness his son would have admired, the father took care of the paperwork that goes into legally ending a life. Written across an envelope are the words 'Bob's Death Certificates.' Paper-clipped to the certified copies is Robert Elliot Silberglied's birth certificate, No 24585. There are scientific publications, including one that came out posthumously in 1988. There are also, in a document Robert Silberglied filled out nine months before his death, instructions in his own hand about his funeral: 'Least expensive means. I mean it.'

Joan doesn't have many stories about her brother. They hardly had contact once they both left Brooklyn. But she wants to tell this one. On the day of his funeral, Joan went outside her parents' condo for a cigarette. The grounds, she says, were almost desolate, but as she sat there, a small yellow butterfly came up out of nowhere and hit her in the face. As it fluttered away, Joan says, these words formed in her mind: 'Bye, Bob.'